It Has Begun.

Today LibDem leader and deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg mad his first big speech. Thin on detail this speech announced the government's plans to introduce the biggest overhaul in British civil liberties since 1832. Cleggs role was to make the argument that this was needed to take the power out of the hands of centralised government and place it in the hands of local people in local communities using whatever liberal buzzwords work for you.

The real purpose of the speech though was to pave the way for the Conservative Home Secretary, Theresa May's speech to the Police Federation. In this speech Ms May announced plans to overhaul civil liberties by going back to the old ways and doing with police bureaucracy like the Stop & Search forms and putting the power to decide who gets prosecuted and who doesn't back into the hands of the police. Since the early 1990's the decision on whether to prosecute lay in the hands of lawyers at the Crown Prosecution Service. The Stop & Search form is simply a form that the police have to fill in every time they stop and search someone. It asks them to record the legal reason they have for carrying out the search.

Both of this pieces of bureaucracy were brought in by a Conservative government in response to the Stephen Lawerence murder. Here five white men went out and murdered a black man for the simple reason that he was black. As the police who investigated the case didn't see a problem with killing niggers they didn't bother investigate the murder and initially tried not to prosecute the killers. This caused such a public outrage that the government were forced to take these powers out of the hands of the police because they clearly couldn't be trusted to use them properly.

If that's the old way of doing things then I think it belongs firmly in the past.